Tag Archives: doctor who

Peep Game Comix: “Attention All African American comic book creators and publishers, we are looking for original titles to add to Peep Game Comix. We are looking for current projects and even back catalogs of books.”

Hurricanes with women’s names more deadly: study | Joan Cary at Chicago Tribune (June 2): “According to a recent study by University of Illinois researchers, hurricanes with women’s names are likely to cause significantly more deaths than those with masculine names — not because the feminine-named storms are stronger, but because they are perceived as less threatening and so people are less prepared.”

Why Have Female Hurricanes Killed More People Than Male Ones? | Ed Yong at National Geographic (June 2): “Jung team thinks that the effect he found is due to unfortunate stereotypes that link men with strength and aggression, and women with warmth and passivity… But Jeff Lazo from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research disagrees. He’s a social scientist and economist who has looked into the public communication of hurricane risk, and he thinks the pattern is most likely a statistical fluke, which arose because of the ways in which the team analysed their data.” (Study authors respond at comment #7.)

Do Female-Named Hurricanes Need To Lean In? | Beth Novey at NPR (June 3): “We’re also worried about what this trend means for the career advancement of female storms. We’ve seen this before. We know where this is going. So to get ahead of the curve, we’d like to offer some advice to all the girls out there hoping to become fearsome natural disasters when they grow up.”

We Can Be Atheists Without Being Jerks | s.e. smith at this ain’t livin’ (June 3): “I wasn’t aware that atheism came with a requirement to be an asshole to people of faith, to mock, belittle, and hurt them for believing in something different than you do — and the hostility towards religion from prominent atheists these days makes me, at times, embarrassed to call myself one.”

Goodbye to All That: Today Is Katie Cotton’s Last Day at Apple | Kara Swisher at Re/code (May 30): “Consider the various words used to describe her: ‘Queen of Evil,’ ‘wicked witch,’ ‘cold and distant,’ ‘frigid supremacy,’ ‘queen bee’ and, perhaps most obviously misogynistic, “dominatrix.”… it’s both sad and disturbing that it’s still okay to talk about a high-ranking woman in this way and make it seem as if it was a cogent and valid commentary on her performance as a professional executive.”

Codes of conduct aren’t enough | Coral Sheldon-Hess at Web Kunoichi (May 29): “I’m not arguing against codes of conduct, here. I’m just saying, a code of conduct isn’t enough; it’s a good first step, but you can’t adopt one (even a good one) and then pat yourself on the back that your community is safe and welcoming and beautiful. If we want our communities and events to be safe and welcoming, we need to build a culture of mutual support, of standing up for one another and not letting anyone be mistreated or made to feel uncomfortable for being who they are.”

The Gentrifier’s Guide to Getting Along | Chinaka Hodge at San Francisco Magazine (May 30): “The core of what this means is that your new neighbors, we folks who have been here, who remember Oakland before we were Michelin starred, Decemberists headlined, or Times approved, are traumatized. We are hurt, confused, angry, and disillusioned. We lost people, we lost homes, we lost agency, we lost our favorite eateries—we even lost the ability to name our hoods.”

How to Get Girls Into Coding | Nitasha Tiku at the New York Times (May 31): “So what if, instead of trying to guess at what might get girls interested in technology, we looked at what’s already on their screens? While parents often worry about recreational ‘screen time,’ some educators now believe that gaming could be a way to get girls interested in coding, and even to increase the numbers of girls in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — classes and schools.”

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Study: Gender Bias In Digital Marketing Is Real | Ginny Marvin at Search Engine Land (May 14): “Across the board, female account reps received below average satisfaction scores, and every single male account representative received higher satisfaction scores than the highest rated female. To answer the question of whether men are just better at making AdWords recommendations than women, WordStream pulled performance data from its AdWords Grader tool for the accounts included in the survey. They looked at aggregate grades for the accounts overseen by male and female reps. Lo and behold, the accounts supported by female reps had higher AdWords Grader scores than those managed by men — by 19 percent.”

Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible. Here’s Where We Start | Laura Hudson at Wired (May 15) [warning: rape threats, misogynistic abuse, and discussion of online abuse]: “Riot Games (publisher of League of Legends) found that persistently negative players were only responsible for roughly 13 percent of the game’s bad behavior. The other 87 percent was coming from players whose presence, most of the time, seemed to be generally inoffensive or even positive. These gamers were lashing out only occasionally, in isolated incidents – but their outbursts often snowballed through the community. Banning the worst trolls wouldn’t be enough to clean up League of Legends, Riot’s player behavior team realized. Nothing less than community-wide reforms could succeed.”

The Rise of the Voluntariat | Geoff Shullenberger at Jacobin (May 15): “Internships have made work more like non-work by uncoupling it from the expectation of wages. Social media have made non-work more like work by permitting the commodification of spheres of activity previously never conceived of as labor. The emergence of the voluntariat follows logically from both of these developments.”

Doctor Who Names First Female Directors Since 2010 | Susana Polo at The Mary Sue (May 15): “The last episode of Doctor Who to be directed by a woman was “Amy’s Choice,” in 2010, and it remains the only lady-directed episode in the entirety of Steven Moffat’s tenure as showrunner. Not that lady-directed episodes were so exactly abundant before he took over, but they will now be joined by two more episodes when the show returns for Series 8. And that new director is… long-time television director Rachel Talalay, who also sat the director’s chair for Lori Petty‘s cult favorite Tank Girl. […] As the show has come under increasing criticism for the limited or clichéd picture it draws with its female characters, eyes have turned to the fact that there are very few women behind the cameras.”

We Can Do Better | Ri Liu (May 14): “This is a visualisation of the gender disparity in engineering teams in the tech industry. […] The creator of this project acknowledges that gender is not always binary, but due to the nature of the data available, only a male/female breakdown is displayed at this time.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

How to ask to get paid to speak | Seb Lee-Delisle (May 2) “New speakers often feel awkward about asking for a speaker fee, and some conference organisers take advantage of this by not offering you one…here’s my advice for making sure you’re not taken advantage of.”

A Formula for Speaking Fees | Jenn Lukas (May 2): “When I speak at a conference, I am committing to spending time away from traditional client work to prep a talk, practice a talk, travel to/from a talk, and give the talk. I’m super into math and formulas and I find that hard numbers allow me to figure a fair speaking fee.”

25 Awesome Women in Gaming | Megan Crouse at Den of Geek (May 2): “For every woman on this list, there are many others working in the games industry in art, design, programming, marketing, management, and more. Even so, it’s not unusual to find a development team comprised of only, or mostly, male workers.”

This Isn’t Just About Star Wars | Tyler F at SharcTank (April 30): (‘ware ableist subtitle, gah) “…the cast of the new Star Wars trilogy was announced yesterday by Lucasfilm… Unfortunately, although the announcement shows a hint of racial diversity, it shows almost no gender diversity.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

So the idea of my cosplay project (which I have completed a big chunk of, but am putting on the shelf for a bit, so that I can mull it over in my subconscious) was pretty simple. Most people give these very simplistic answers about their motivations for their cosplay: it’s fun, it’s for the pure love of the show, it’s about hanging out with other fans, I like the character, I like the character’s costume, etc. I suspect, like most fan scholars, that something more complicated than those reasons go into cosplayers’ decision-making. So I chose a particular cosplay trend—women cosplaying as the Doctor—and tried to get beyond those reasons, both through interviewing and by “reading” the costumes. Which, of course, has all got me thinking about my own motivations and decisions in the cosplay I wore to Gally. Obviously, the premise of my project is that cosplayers don’t necessarily consciously know all the reasons they make the decisions they make in their cosplay, and I don’t consider myself an exception to that premise. In fact, I knew I wasn’t sure what it was about a steampunk TARDIS dress that held such a fascination with me. I only knew, as I told a friend at the time, that if I could dress as the TARDIS and wear a bustle at the same time, I’d be a happy lady.

So the idea of my cosplay project (which I have completed a big chunk of, but am putting on the shelf for a bit, so that I can mull it over in my subconscious) was pretty simple. Most people give these very simplistic answers about their motivations for their cosplay: it’s fun, it’s for the pure love of the show, it’s about hanging out with other fans, I like the character, I like the character’s costume, etc. I suspect, like most fan scholars, that something more complicated than those reasons go into cosplayers’ decision-making. So I chose a particular cosplay trend—women cosplaying as the Doctor—and tried to get beyond those reasons, both through interviewing and by “reading” the costumes. Which, of course, has all got me thinking about my own motivations and decisions in the cosplay I wore to Gally. Obviously, the premise of my project is that cosplayers don’t necessarily consciously know all the reasons they make the decisions they make in their cosplay, and I don’t consider myself an exception to that premise. In fact, I knew I wasn’t sure what it was about a steampunk TARDIS dress that held such a fascination with me. I only knew, as I told a friend at the time, that if I could dress as the TARDIS and wear a bustle at the same time, I’d be a happy lady.

I see this coming up again and again in discussions about pop culture; this is an attitude I myself once embraced and espoused, like it was a badge of honor to dislike most female characters. I thought I was being oh-so-edgy and critiquing female characters when really I was engaging in an age-old form of misogyny, where people prove how progressive they are by saying they hate women.

I know, it sounds weird. But there is a thing that happens where some feminists declare themselves firmly to be ‘one of the guys.’ I’m not sure if it’s a defensive tactic, designed to flip some attitudes about feminism and feminists, or if there is a genuine belief that being feminist means ‘being one of the guys.’ Once you are ‘one of the guys,’ you of course need to prove it by bashing on women, because this is what ‘guys’ do, yes? So you say that you don’t really ‘connect with’ or ‘like’ female characters you encounter in pop culture.

If feminists feel pressure to be accepted as “one of the guys,” imagine how geek women feel, particularly early in their lives, when they often feel isolated from one another.

This tendency to dislike female character reminds me of anotherÂ “being one of the guys” strategy: I often meet women who tell me proudly, “I just don’t get along with women.* All of my best friends have been guys.” These womenÂ also oftenÂ think that this fact actually makes themÂ progressive (because nothing’s more radical than failing to create female-centric relationships!). And most of the women I’ve known whoÂ say this are geeks. It’s actually one of the reasons it took so long for me to become friends with geeks, because “I don’t get along with women” is dealbreaker for me. Any woman who says this is either a) telling me that I can never expect more than perfunctory friendship with them or b) inviting me to denigrate women as well, as the basis of our friendship. And no thank you.

Which is not, of course, to say that these ladies are horrible people. Women who refuse to connect with other women, fictional or real, are not causing the problem, but perpetuating it, because they’ve bought patriarchal narratives about women hook, line, and sinker. They seek connections with men, because men are the rational, smarter set, and by doing so they feel required toÂ malign their own genders, because, as smith points out, “bashing on women” is just what dudes do.Â But loving other women, connecting with other women, is one of the most radical feminist act one can perform. And I think that goes for fictional characters, too, especially since I know that my personal path to feminism would have been greatly hindered if it weren’t for Xena and Buffy.

So it hurts my heart when geeks inexplicably “hate” female characters on geek shows. Indeed, the two examples smith uses are actually from geeky/fantasy/SF shows: True Blood and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It seems likeÂ misogynist write-offs of female characters areÂ disturbingly prevalent inÂ allegedly progressive fan cultures (like the overtly feminist Buffy), and the ones that have been pissing me off lately are, of course, Doctor Who-related. A sizeable part of DW and TorchwoodÂ fandomsÂ has a lot of ire for female characters from these series. The two I want to focus on, in part becauseÂ hatred of these characters is well-represented in both fan communitities, areÂ Gwen Cooper (from Torchwood) and River Song (from Doctor Who).

[Spoilers for season 5 of Doctor Who and Torchwood: Children of Earth (season 3) below the fold.]

svollga points out a lot of irritating privilege fail in a discussion about the invisibility of queer characters in the current Doctor Who season.

Time to Hire a Housekeeper?: The study shows that highly productive faculty members, both male and female, employ others to help with core housework at a higher rate than others — but women do it much more often than men. (Note, there’s no discussion of any of the race, class or disability issues around doing housework or paying others for it.)

A Conversation with Ava Pope, physicist: Most physics majors don’t spend months carefully analyzing a few lines of poetry, let alone publish a paper on the research in a national publication. But Ava Pope wasn’t the average physics major.

skeptifem: Where are all the female skeptics at?: Anyone who has been in a skeptics group knows this discussion. Some dudes (and occasionally a few ladies) decide that it has something to do with the evolution of the mind and the innate ability of women to understand science or logic… These debates start because there is a noticable lack of women in skeptic groups, but also because statistically women are more likely to be religious or believe in stuff like psychics.

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